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Valluvan Jeevanandam skipped fifth grade, finished high school in three years, entered college at 15 and graduated summa cum laude from New York's Columbia University at 19.

And he says medical school was a breeze.

"Math and science came naturally for me," says Dr. Jeevanandam.

A native of Southern India, Dr. Jeevanandam emigrated to the United States as a young child and grew up mostly in New Jersey. Before arriving at the University of Chicago, he was surgical director of the heart transplant program at Philadelphia's Temple University, where he performed 70 to 80 transplants a year and quickly built the program into one of the nation's largest.

That's quite a feat considering that within a week after he arrived at Temple, the entire heart-transplant staff, including cardiologists, defected to another hospital and took patients with them.

"When he called, I said, 'Look, you know more about this than anybody who just left, and you're also more energetic than all of them combined. You'll make it work.' And he did," says Dr. Eric A. Rose, chairman of the surgery department at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York and Dr. Jeevanandam's mentor. "That simply describes who he is. He's enormously gifted and brilliant."

Working 14-hour days and often through the night, Dr. Jeevanandam is geared up to strengthen U of C's cardiac surgery program.

"I like doing things under pressure," he says. "I always work best when I have 10 things to do at the same time."